‘Modern housewives run their homes and family in the same way a chief executive runs a business empire.” I read this statement just after hearing that, with less than 24 hours to go before departure, the holiday accommodation I thought I had booked was no longer available. Two minutes before that, I had been examining the 10in-scar the 12-year-old received after sticking her arm through a window, and dealing with the news that the rabbit had escaped. Again. The only business empire this home resembles is Enron.

If my family were a corporation, the receivers would have been called in years ago. I can barely run the egg and spoon race. Yet the corporate world has become the template for so many activities, from the school fete — now subject to health and safety regulations — to marriage. (What do you mean you didn’t sign a prenup?)

Two female United Airline executives have written a book describing how they applied their boardroom skills to managing their husbands and there are books on how to raise your children using performance-management tools. Even women who are too busy wiping down the conservatory walls to worry about the glass ceiling are expected to think like Sir Alan Sugar these days.

Now new Labour, with its love of big business, is considering extending the corporate model to our social ills. Jack McConnell is said to be toying with the idea of introducing “contracts” for drug addicts. The idea is that addicts would sign a document agreeing not to have children in return for treatment. The incentive scheme, or disincentive scheme, would set out their social responsibilities. Benefits would be docked if they reneged.

The idea comes from Duncan McNeil, the Labour MSP for Greenock and Inverclyde, who suggested recently putting contraceptives in methadone. Labour is said to be considering this new “tough love” solution as part of its manifesto preparations ahead of next year’s Holyrood elections. The details, however, are still rather fuzzy. Nobody has explained what will happen to the treatment-less and benefit-deprived addicts when they default. Or how the rule could be applied to male addicts; it’s only women, after all, who get pregnant.

There are some who believe McNeil should sign a contract agreeing not to have any more brainchildren until he has a better grasp of the issues. The British Association of Social Workers in Scotland has declared the proposals “comparable to genocide”, which is the sort of hysterical reaction that gives social workers a bad name. Lawyers have warned that it may breach legislation on human rights — human wrongs being of little interest to the legal profession these days.

McNeil is entitled to think “outside the box” and he has certainly been instrumental in raising the very real plight of children born to addicts. There are said to be 60,000 such children in Scotland, twice as many per head of population as in the rest of the UK. What is more depressing than an Irvine Welsh novel, however, is the fact that new Labour, in government for almost a decade, is still looking for quick-fix solutions to problems that are as intractable as they are complex.

It is no business of the state’s to offer “tough love” to addicts. The state’s role is to enforce the law and ensure the basic health needs of its citizens are met. It is for the individual to accept the consequences of their behaviour. The state has no mandate to tell even the most feckless how to run their lives.

There are interventions that work well. Based on abstinence, they work best in an in-patient setting and are costly to run. Outside the private sector, they are thin on the ground. These are the interventions addicts say they want. They are not, by and large, the interventions the NHS offers.

If new Labour is serious about tackling the problem of drugs — and the best way to help the children of drug addicts is to eradicate drugs from their lives — it needs to co-ordinate a crackdown on the supply, while simultaneously funding those treatments with a proven track record and establishing effective prevention programmes. Making and keeping prisons — the one environment over which the state has total control — drug-free should be a priority.

The sense of hopelessness surrounding Scotland’s drug problem is understandable, but it is not inevitable. In Dumfries and Galloway recently, 100 dealers were removed from the streets and hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of heroin seized in “Operation Round-up”. As a result, the number of addicts seeking help increased threefold. But for such initiatives to work properly, police, clinicians and social workers have to be given the support and resources necessary to carry out the job long term.

We don’t need to borrow from the boardroom to deal with our social ills. Signed bits of paper won’t stop junkies spawning. Effective treatment for those seeking help combined with the rigorous pursuit of those who persist in breaking the law is the best chance of minimising the harm both to the families of addicts and to society. That doesn’t warrant a contract, but it does require a great deal of political will.

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